Digital Nomad Challenges Are Often Role Dependent

by Greg Fenton / Sep 16

Mobility means many different things to many different people.  Maturity of infrastructure and mobility solutions vary widely amongst small, medium and large enterprises. Larger enterprises often implementing more stringent and automated systems, whereas smaller businesses often depend on the individual mobile workers to determine their requirements and often implement them themselves.

Depending on the job function, access to different types of data dictate the user’s mobility and connectivity needs.

Trainers, field service personnel and many types of sales roles can get by simply by having a static copy of relevant data on a hard drive.  Infrequent access to email and availability by cellphone are more than sufficient for this type of worker.  These workers have laptops rather than desktops and therefore travel with their entire work environment.  Their laptops are the repository of their key data, having either created documents with or copied required documents to this device.  Responsible individuals or IT departments have secured those devices with appropriate passwords and encryption though often this is not the case.  Backups of this key data are done haphazardly to network shares, content management systems or, less frequently, enterprise backup software.

Other roles dictate the need for up-to-the-minute style of access for information.  These users are in the minority of “mobile workers” but often are senior employees/executives whose mobile requirements command a larger portion the attention of IT department’s attention.  These individuals typically can get by with less powerful devices such as tablet PCs or micro PCs.  However, their lowered need for horsepower is replaced by their need for immediacy of data; ready access to the Internet for email and to mobilized applications, typically enterprise applications that have been enhanced with a browser-based interface.

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